Definition: What is Ad Technology? Ad technology is basically an umbrella phrase for a number of computer-based tools and programs used by advertisers, publishers, and other market players for strategic marketing and management of their ad campaigns or online monetization activity. It is one of the fastest growing segments within the marketing field. Ad Tech is not a part of the traditional marketing methodologies such as direct mail, TV commercials, or other offline media. Ad Tech helps marketers create and manage their advertising technologies in such a way that results in increased revenues and a larger customer base.
Defining an Advertising Technology discipline may be challenging because it involves a combination of traditional marketing strategies, new technologies, and hybrid models. For example, traditional online advertising such as display advertising, pay per click, and search engine optimization are included as components of an advertising technology program. On the other hand, new technologies, such as mobile marketing, media-delivered advertising, and internet banner ads are considered as offshoots. In addition, the traditional models, such as magazine, newspaper, billboard, television, and fast food advertising, are being challenged by online marketing strategies like social networking. As a result, the discipline is expanding and becoming more fragmented with a greater number of ad-tech tools and processes.
The umbrella term “Advertising Technology” is now a useful device for describing many diverse technological innovations that help the advertiser, publisher, or marketer to enhance their campaigns. Some of these include online advertising, which extend beyond the traditional web browser advertisements; display advertising, which make use of many display formats such as banners, screensavers, movies, slide shows, and others; search engine marketing, which seek new ways to get higher search engine rankings for targeted key phrases; and mobile marketing, which make use of applications such as smart phones, handheld devices, tablets, and even games to enhance the advertising experience. However, it should be noted that technology has been around since ancient times and the evolution of technology is accelerating. Hence, there is no dearth of potential methods and platforms for advertising. Therefore, even if the umbrella term “Advertising Technology” does shed a different light on the subject, the term can in no way undermine its importance and role in advertising’s modern day evolution.
One of the features of the modern day advertising technology is the so called “bid advertising”, which seeks to achieve cost per click by placing sponsored links on popular websites. It is a cost per impression strategy. In a way, it seeks to achieve a lower cost per thousand impressions by putting up ads on websites that are visited frequently by the target demographic. This type of cost per performance advertising allows the advertisers to set a maximum budget for each click through and also allows them to decide on the specific audience or demographic to which the ads will show.
For example, mobile location awareness is one such service that has garnered much popularity as an advanced form of the traditional pay per view method of advertising. Mobile location-aware ads are ads that can be displayed and targeted based on the users’ current location. For instance, if someone walks past a coffee shop while travelling to work, the ad displayed will track where he/she is and whether they are near a gas station or convenience store to maximize their reach. The advertisers’ ability to track users with this kind of sophisticated tracking is only limited by the advertisers’ imagination.
Another form of specialized Internet advertising is the Digital Mobile Advertising (DMA), which uses sophisticated DPI sensing technologies that can be used to display relevant ads on the user’s cell phone screen. Some examples of this technology include Clear Pictures, Tile Digital Video and Digital Outdoor Video Ads. Mobile advertising is especially convenient for small businesses because they do not have to allocate extra funds to create and manage a market research campaign. The DMA technique is highly scalable and flexible and is suitable for any business regardless of its size. Hence, a successful marketing strategy through the help of ad tech depends on a sound assessment of the competition. A mobile-based approach is more effective in reaching target customers because they spend more time using mobile devices to access the Internet rather than a computer.